Multidimensional biases, gaps and uncertainties in global plant occurrence information

• Published in: Ecology letters Vol. 19; no. 8; pp. 992 - 1006
• Main Authors: Meyer, Carsten, Weigelt, Patrick, Kreft, Holger
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.08.2016
• Subjects: biogeography; Conservation biology; Conservation status; Data bias; data deficiency; data uncertainty; Demography; ecology; Ecosystem; embryophytes; Environmental Monitoring; Global Biodiversity Information Facility; Global Strategy for Plant Conservation; herbarium specimens; Information Services; knowledge gaps; livelihood; monitoring; Plant ecology; plant taxonomy; Plants - classification; species distributions; Species Specificity; survey effort; Taxonomy; uncertainty; Wallacean shortfall; species distributions; data uncertainty; Global Biodiversity Information Facility; Data bias; herbarium specimens; survey effort; Wallacean shortfall; knowledge gaps; Global Strategy for Plant Conservation; data deficiency
• ISSN: 1461-023X; 1461-0248
• DOI: 10.1111/ele.12624

Plants are a hyperdiverse clade that plays a key role in maintaining ecological and evolutionary processes as well as human livelihoods. Biases, gaps and uncertainties in plant occurrence information remain a central problem in ecology and conservation, but these limitations remain largely unassessed globally. In this synthesis, we propose a conceptual framework for analysing gaps in information coverage, information uncertainties and biases in these metrics along taxonomic, geographical and temporal dimensions, and apply it to all c. 370 000 species of land plants. To this end, we integrated 120 million point‐occurrence records with independent databases on plant taxonomy, distributions and conservation status. We find that different data limitations are prevalent in each dimension. Different metrics of information coverage and uncertainty are largely uncorrelated, and reducing taxonomic, spatial or temporal uncertainty by filtering out records would usually come at great costs to coverage. In light of these multidimensional data limitations, we discuss prospects for global plant ecological and biogeographical research, monitoring and conservation and outline critical next steps towards more effective information usage and mobilisation. Our study provides an empirical baseline for evaluating and improving global floristic knowledge, along with a conceptual framework that can be applied to study other hyperdiverse clades.